Oh, we talk the big talk, but…

It’s getting extremely difficult to brag about being an American. Take voting, for example. Doesn’t it make you feel sad when you come to realize that, as far as honest elections goes, your country ranks low on the scale? Even purple-fingered Iraqis laugh at us.

Confusing ballot designs still plague elections

The solution should have been a no-brainer, voting experts say. After all, it was a badly designed ballot that enflamed the 2000 election meltdown and introduced the vagaries of chads to the political lexicon - pregnant, hanging and otherwise.

So it would seem that redesigning ballots to make them simpler should have been a high priority. But that hasn’t been the case, voting experts say.

Eight years after the fiasco in Florida’s Palm Beach County, confusing ballots continue to stymie voters and plague elections in this primary season.

“The sad fact is, we still have not systematically addressed the need for good ballot design standards,” said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school. “We’ve spent billions of dollars on overhauling election administration in this country, but we’re still seeing the same ballot design mistakes in almost every federal election.”